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Berkman Center Announces 2012-2013 Fellows

June 28, 2012

Cambridge, MA - The Berkman Center for Internet
& Society at Harvard University today announced the fellows who
will join the community in the 2012-2013 academic year, continuing a
tradition of providing a home for some of the most incisive and
creative minds in law, technology, and social science, alongside
path-breaking entrepreneurs and activists.

“The 2012-2013 fellows bring to Berkman an astounding level of
expertise, a diversity in viewpoints and interests, and a willingness
to innovatively and deeply engage the many pressing questions related
to the ongoing development of the Internet” said Urs Gasser, Berkman’s
Executive Director. “Their commitment to spending the next year in
Cambridge provides us the opportunity to build bridges across our
shared and independent activities, and to serve the public interest
with rigorous research, concerted action, and genuine kinship. We very
much look forward to the year ahead with this inspiring group of
colleagues.”

In addition to our fellows, each year the Berkman Center’s community is
strengthened by relationships with faculty associates, fellows advisory
board members, and affiliates and partners the world over. Their
contributions are fundamental to the Berkman Center’s work and
identity, helping to further bolster ties among organizations around
the world and to bolster the capacity of the field.

New 2012-2013 Berkman fellows:

Kendra Albert will deepen her relationship with Berkman and work on the
H2O project for open educational resources, as well as explore new
topics in generativity and online gatekeeping.

Meg Leta Ambrose, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado's
interdisciplinary ATLAS Institute, will explore the legal, social, and
technical issues surrounding the proposed digital right to be forgotten.

Laura Norton Amico, editor and founder of Homicide Watch in Washington,
D.C., will study criminal justice journalism in the digital age,
focusing on best practices, useful tools and new models for crime and
courts reporting. She is one of two new Nieman-Berkman Fellows in
Journalism Innovation.

Bodó Balázs, a Fulbright Visiting Researcher from the Budapest
University of Technology and Economics, will work on his book on
bottom-up, voluntary intellectual property regimes that emerge in
piratical file-sharing communities and other informal media economies.

Matthew Becker, a Harvard Law School 3L and Editor-in-Chief of the
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, will explore a solution to the
problem of adhesive standard form contracts such as terms of service,
using an approach that draws on the decentralized nature of the
Internet.

Jacques de Werra, Professor of intellectual property and contract law
at the University of Geneva, will conduct research on the development
of global intellectual property licensing policies in the online
environment.

Ruha Devanesan, Executive Director of Internetbar.org, will research
the impact of the digitization of the music industry on developing
world music creation and consumption.

Borja Echevarría de la Gándara, Deputy Managing Editor of El País in
Spain, will study the structural evolution of newsrooms around the
world and how disruptive innovation is altering traditional business
and workflow models for news. He is one of two new
Nieman-Berkman Fellows in Journalism Innovation.

Eric Gordon, Associate Professor at Emerson College and Director of the
Engagement Game Lab, will examine how social media and games are
transforming local civic engagement.

Phil Hill, a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, will explore
copyright law and policies relating to creative expression in the
digital age.

Diana Kimball, an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, will apply
an open-source ethos to her work on mentoring and her research on
internet culture.

Rosemary Leith, a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, will join
Berkman's Internet Robustness team, building awareness and facilitating
partnerships in the effort to support a more stable and reliable Web.

Ching-Yi Liu, Professor of law at National Taiwan University and
Principal Investigator of Taiwan's National E-Learning and Digital
Archives Program, will explore issues related to network neutrality,
technology policies related to digital libraries, and freedom of the
press in the Internet age.

Maria Löblich, Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication
Science and Media Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, will
work on civil society's involvement in net neutrality contentions and
its intertwining with other political actors in the United States.

Xinlei Lu, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism at Fudan
University, Shanghai will work on how cyber-technology has been
employed to prevent HIV/AIDS in the gay community in China, and the
political, commercial, and social factors implicated therein.

Jun-Ru Lu, a public prosecutor of Taipei District Prosecutors Office in
Taiwan, will develop his research on electronic case files and evidence
in criminal procedure.

Silvio Meira, Professor of software engineering at the Center for
Informatics at the Federal University of Pernambuco and Chief Scientist
at the Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems, will work on
innovation networks and habitats in developing economies and Brazil in
particular and will have a go at The Emerging Web of Machines.

O'Seun Odewale, Personal Assistant and Adviser to Governor of Ekiti
State, South West Nigeria will explore Open Society in the context of
new technologies and the politics of control.

Jonathon Penney, a research fellow at the University of Toronto’s
Citizen Lab and a Ph.D. candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute,
University of Oxford, will work primarily on his doctoral research
concerning regulatory chilling effects online.

Alberto Pepe, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for
Astrophysics of Harvard University and co-founder of Authorea, will
research and promote Open Science and develop the next generation of
tools for the collaborative authorship of research projects.

Molly Sauter, a S.M. candidate in Comparative Media Studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be examining conflicts of
anonymity and pseudonymity at the intersections of digital activism and
"real life" activism.

Elisabeth Staksrud, a research fellow at the Department of Media and
Communication at the University of Oslo, will work on her new book,
critically exploring the relationship between NGOs and the Internet
industry in the field of online protection of children.

Alexander H. Trechsel, Professor of political science at the European
University Institute in Florence, will work on internet voting and,
more generally, the transformation of representative democracy in the
digital era.

Jessica Valenti, a feminist author and activist, will research and
develop a plan for a national think tank grounded in digital feminism
and its communities.

Heather Whitney, a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, will
investigate how we can better leverage social platforms and the rise of
citizen science and quantified self to improve health and health
research.

John Palfrey will take on the role as a senior research fellow at
Berkman while he also transitions
to his position of Head of School of Phillips Academy, Andover. In
addition, he will maintain his position as a member of the Berkman
Center’s Board of Directors and serve as a principal investigator on
selected projects, including the Digital Public Library of America.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is
a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study,
and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous
gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center is home to an ever-growing
community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on
projects that span the broad range of intersections between cyberspace,
technology, and society. More information can be found at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.